sELFiNDUCEDcOMA

If you are intending to release this, did you get permission to use the Nar Shaddaa skybox texture, as it appears to be based on someone else's work?

OK, since your not trying to "steal" my work, just this once, I'll let a competitor know how I do things .

When I went to find the model file myself, I found that it wasn't a clearly marked separate model. So, I figured it needs to be part of those used for the Peragus levels. When I finally got around to looking at these via NWmax and looking at the texture lists generated by MDLops, I found it wasn't its own separate model but part of a scene model. Two actually.

One is used for when you are inside the facility looking out, the other is used when you are outside the facility looking in. One of these is 104perg (outside) and the other is 101perzc (inside).

As for the Nebula, I'm assuming you mean the yellow glow as seen in the first screenshot. As far as I recall the nebula - plasma gas field, thing - has nothing to do with it as I changed the texture to test whether it was being used at all. First I made it a solid pink, the next I deleted all the pixels to make transparent. In both cases it had no effect. What makes the glow as far as I know, is how the game decides to render things and what settings have been set for the mesh the texture is applied to. For example, if it is set to be a light, then it will glow based upon the "brightness" of the pixels of the textures.

So to cut a long story short, when I edited the texture file to enhance it, it changed from a strong orange red to a "brighter" orange yellow, along with making other contrasting parts of it darker. This then as far as I can tell, created the glow effect as seen in the screenshot -- though, it may also be affected by the surrounding mesh that is in place used for the nebula that isn't being rendered; as Peragus planet texture (mesh) sits within the middle of this.

Is this outside (104per)? If so, already fixed for 1.8.3.

Or do you mean inside (101per)? If so, I haven't noticed anything happening, but I could check it out...

 

EDIT: All looks fine to me in 101...

I first noticed it when I saved after the Harbinger arrived and I was outside on the exterior walkway in 104per. Second time was after the Harbinger arrived and I had moved on to a point where I was back within the facility and could look outside to see the Harbinger docked from within 101per. In both cases the Harbinger had disappeared on loading the save game.

The last time I noticed was different, I had played from the beginning again (as it only took 10 minutes to get to where I needed to be) and had saved within the admin area overseeing where the Harbinger would eventually be docked within 101per. On the 3 or 4 reload it hit me that the Harbinger was not supposed to be visible. I reloaded from an earlier save and the Harbinger was not there but upon saving and reloading, it was again.

I dunno, is the fix you created for the Harbinger just supposed to work within 104per or will it work no matter where you are?

If its global to Peragus then chances are you fixed it anyway, otherwise, I'll have to install a fresh copy on my notebook to see if I can recreate it there and find the culprit if there is any.

Hello, I have an issue that I'm trying to track down as to what is causing it: my own mod work, TSLRCM or just an outstanding game bug -- or maybe the widescreen fixed EXE I'm using.

Basically the issue is that the Harbinger appears and disappears when you load up a save game. To be more clear, if you play the Peragus levels everything appears to trigger just fine, however, if you are in the admin command area prior to the Harbinger appearing, and save the game and then load it up. The Harbinger appears through the windows already docked. But, if you are at a point where the Harbinger has arrived and docked and then save and load up that save game, the Harbinger disappears.

I haven't tested this further yet to see if it reappears if you save and load again or keep on playing through and come to a point where you can see the Harbinger again to see if it reappears or not. All I know for certain is that this bug was around before I started touching any of the module files in that I first noticed it when testing out the Harbinger textures I was working on. At first I thought it had to do with an issue where if the texture is too big and has alpha / spec present, you will be dumped to your desktop on the end of the initial Harbinger arrival movie playing and before the in-game Harbinger docking cutscene plays out.

Sorry if this has been raised before elsewhere: there are a lot of threads for this mod and searching for this particular issue is of no help. Plus, unless you are repeatedly loading up save games specifically to test things to do with the Harbinger, then it is very likely that this may not have been reported yet. Hopefully this has been experienced before or someone else might be able to recreate the conditions to see if it appears or not -- otherwise I'll try a re-install later on to test it out.

Also, if anyone knows what might be the issue or what "controls" whether the Harbinger appears or not, so that I can work on a script for this. I would appreciate hearing it as I don't know the files as well as some do and so far I haven't had any luck pinpointing it  .

EDIT: the best I can figure is that it is controlled via an animation controller object within 104per, but, not certain how these are used as I haven't found any info on them yet.

--

SIC

Thanks for the positive feedback and comments folks.

@ Sith Holocron:

Not really sure what to say, or put another way, whether I should say it...

People tend to put all their effort within what they think will get the biggest bang for their buck or what interests them at all other costs. So adding new weapon models for example, no matter what game it is, will always be a popular thing to do -- popular for modders to do it, and popular in that these get downloaded a lot. Things like fixing some bad texturing, that though ugly doesn't impeded gameplay -- even if it reminds you straight away that you are playing a game by undermining the atmosphere created -- isn't very "sexy" at all, and may not get much acclaim for their hard work. Why they get ignored as it isn't seen as important to warrant the effort -- though are range of reasons will be given that don't say that at all but something else.

But, I know better in that you need to address those things that you may not want to do along with those that you do, if you want something that isn't just good but might also be considered great. Quality matters in the end, and these little things that aren't important, once all added up, can make for something with a big impact in way of user / player experience.

@ MrPhil:

Not sure if you've noticed, but I'm not really looking for advice on things; I like figuring out things on my own.

Plus, I have all the help that I need in how to figure out stuff, It's called Google -- more people should try it. Seriously, there aren't many problems I can't fix on my own without a couple of Google searches, at least that way I can cross reference things to make sure that what I am being told is correct rather than an assumption that's been around for so long it is considered undisputed unshakable law .

Anyway, I'll post up a mod thread on lucasforums when I update the mod with a new release. Until then I'm happy to post things up here as there is less noise and less opinionated egos -- excluding my own .

EDIT: oh, and that silicone doll effect is from the normal (bump) mapping. Evidently what the game uses is pretty basic, from when the technology first got introduced. So far I haven't bothered to use any of them as they are bad and seem impossible to create in a form for the game to load them up.

At least for now...

Nice to see this mod still in development; and the developer's commitment to quality rather than rushing things out quick and dirty.

Some more of the miscellaneous things I've been working on...

I've also done some additional Peragus / Harbinger fixes...

Well, I found some time to do some more work on this recently; mostly miscellaneous fixes for areas already textured...

Ebon Hawk fixes...

You can add lines in KT, yes, but as far as I know, you can't add columns, which is what TSLPatcher can do.

 

Modifying the necessary files to test this would mean a great deal of very boring work, which leads me to suspect no-one has tried and as such the received wisdom on this is probably not all that reliable. Until Sithspectre tried it a while back, we thought the types of model you could use for ammo were hard-coded, too.

Curious. KT may not be able to add lines but something else might. I recall there was an Excel plugin for reading and writing 2da files; not sure if it is still viable, especially with newer versions of Excel. KT I think also allows you to save 2da files as an XML files, for which there might be a program that can read them and not just as a raw file but as a table of columns and fields. Most extreme, you can then write up a C#.net program to read the XML, display it a a table, allow you to edit it even add columns, and then save the XML again. You should then be able to load it up via KT and save it as a proper 2da file.

My thinking is that that might take some of the tediousness out of trying to do it with TSLPatcher; the C#.net program seems like it would be fairly simple to create over a weekend for someone who's a bit on the rusty side. Conceivably a couple of hours for someone who is on the other side of that spectrum.

However, it seems like you would need to know what columns to add to your 2da files in the first place in order to enable more model options. Still, worth looking into more before I go and change all the armor model files and such, as I would prefer to add rather than limit what options are available to modders. Also, any changes will affect other mods used with this one that rely on those old models.

You can add columns to existing .2da files using TSLPatcher. I haven't tried it, but would it not be possible to add the necessary extra columns to appearance.2da that way, as well as altering the necessary information in baseitems.2da, etc.?

I haven't used TSLPatcher yet, so I'm not sure how much it can do in way of installing files along with editing files and such on install. But you can add lines to appearance.2da via KOTOR Tool, and there probably isn't anything special about what TSLPatcher would do to the 2da file that you can't do with KOTOR Tool. From my experience and what I gather, it isn't an issue with the 2da files but rather the game code itself which has hardcoded various limits, like those for models.

I'm not really sure I have a favourite texture, tend to be happy enough with them to move onto something else. Sometimes I come back to them and give them an update if I think they can be improved.

Though I suppose if recently I was pleased with the following...

It was only meant to be a quick mock-up of the main title image, but it ended up taking a lot longer as the alpha in particular is not rendered as you would see it within your image editor or viewer. It can be improved, but still, it was pleasing to see it in-game along with my initial Sion texture.

If you're asking as to which world I was going to do next, then it would be Korriban. It appears to have a small set of textures, though, that's more than likely misleading as it probably uses a lot of textures from other places, along with, it has a number of creatures as well.

But, I haven't finished Nar Shaddaa yet. I'm also building my skills in max, so I will probably be doing more model editing as well, not just for module stuff like fixing some of the texture problems with the Ebon Hawk, but also characters:

Some people will probably be familiar with it, it is an unused Mandalore No Helmet armor that you can find within the game files. I fixed 3 mesh holes along with vertex weight issues and I'm currently in the early stages of creating the female version of it. These will then be the basis for the new Heavy Powered armor appearance.

It's up to you if you want to use any of it at all; I'm not the one who has to implement any of it. 

Not being able to complete the last bounty is the Bendak Starkiller deathmatch fight. Once you kill him in the arena, you can collect the prize money as well as collect the bounty for killing him from the Hutt in the lower city cantina -- I've forgotten his name already, but I'm pretty sure it and the other quests are all bounty quests.

Actually, I think the mechanic or spice addict's help to get the pass before being able to get access to the swoop garage, seems like a smarter idea actually, fixes the flow of events along with being more simpler to implement than what I suggested .

Wow... What an apology.

I know I have an ego, that's why I refrain from posting on others work for the most part. For fear of writing something like what you just did, Varsity Muppet .

Patronizing, arrogant and ultimately belittling.

And you're wrong, I hardly touch contrast most of the time, not to mention color. Not saying I don't, just saying that you're a muppet who doesn't know what they're talking about if all you think I do is adjust the contrast, color and use the odd overlay most of the time to get my results.

And I don't need a "pep-talk" from you or for you to tell me what I am capable of; so spare me your farce of sincerity, especially when the first thing you start with is calling me an idiot, and the last thing you end with is to belittle my work by pretty much saying it is worthless.

Actually, you're mistaken, and by painting my work that way, using the wording you're using. You ARE belittling my work. It takes a lot of tweaking and testing even for what I would consider "simple" texture changes in order to get something that is effective.

I don't care for your opinion. You don't think much of my work, you don't like what I write, that you think it is just "whining." Then just don't read it instead of making an arrogant belittling comment based on who you think you are.

I think you should just not post to this thread anymore, Varsity Muppet. You're comments are not welcome .

No and no. I just asked a question.

I don't care if you're a "staff reviewer," I don't even care if you own this site. You don't call me an idiot on my own WIP thread, belittle my work, Varsity Muppet .

There's your answer.

There's so many idiotic things you said in that post.

 

So idiotic, I simply can't write a single word....

Pictures say more anyways.

 

 

EDIT: Are you going to do any more texture changes that aren't just contrast/color/overlay tweaks?

You want to explain your post to me?

Seems like I hit a nerve, and with your edit, you are ridiculing me.. Is that the case?

Although I haven't really done anything to mod Oblivion myself(at least not making any mods of my own), I gather that you can add a NPC to the game with a single esp file, containing every bit of information the game needs to spawn it with the appropriate race, class, birthsign, location within a cell, etc, even giving the character a large dialouge and a quest, as long as it uses Oblivions resources - where as with KOTOR, if you want to add an NPC, you have to add entries for them in at least three 2da files(portraits, heads and appearance), deal with the head models and textures for that NPC, make a utc file for the npc, alongside adding scripts to the game that will spawn the npc in the desired location(which requires coordinates. Along with likely a few other things as well. Oh, and if you want them to walk about the area? You don't have pathgrids, and thus you'd have to plot the route yourself, and hope it works as you want.

 

I'd imagine that this technical flaw with KOTOR(or more appropriately it's engine), is due to the fact that upon release, save for patches, it's meant to be complete. With the TES games, while I don't know about Arena or Daggerfall, every one since Morrowind has had expansions or DLC. I know that Dragon Age and Mass Effect has such added content as well, but I'd imagine that it just installs itself upon download, and with that, it's added to the game. I know that with Oblivion, if you don't like say the Shivering Isles or Knights of the Nine? One click and you don't have to see any of that content in the game. I'd imagine it's just like this for Morrowind and Skyrim.

It's an unnecessary flaw to have as part of your engine. That's the part I don't get, why hard code this limitation at all..? Why stop at I or N when you could go to Z..? Why even stop there in that you can then check to see if the next character is a number or letter, if a number, then that donates a sub-model or body variation to the base model. That way you aren't using up D, E and F for the 3 light armor body variants. These sub-models can then go up to Z as well, and if you really want, you can just keep on going until you hit a number, which then tells the engine that this is a texture variant of that (sub-)model.

Being "complete" has absolutely nothing to do with it at all, these are hardcoded for what I can tell is no good reason at all other than to make the game harder to mod and to make developing the game more of a pain the arse. As far as I can tell, only an egotistical idiot would code it this way -- which there are many in game development .

I have to be frank, some of what I've read from the KOTOR / TSL modding community seems rather naive due to my experiences with other level and world building tools. This assumption that this is the way you "mod" a game because people haven't tried to mod any other game and  don't seem to know any better; in that there are good reasons NOT to mod a game that way.

If someone asked me what game to mod for a first project, I wouldn't tell them to go with KOTOR or TSL -- especially if you're not strong at programming. Modding these is more along the lines of hacking, with most of the modding in way of quests at least, dependent upon your ability to script -- even if you want to place something simple like a container within a module. I would actually suggest one of the Bethseda games, as though their tools along with those developed for the community, may be buggy. They at least have some decent tools; trying to achieve the same things, will likely take you at least 3 times longer and not be anywhere near as good due to all the limitations in place. Furthermore, you are correct, all of the mod changes / additions -- beyond the asset files -- are stored in an ESP patch file; and objects are instanced rather than unique objects being stored within a module's rim file. It makes finding and editing things much easier, especially as you can easily find out what else something uses or what uses it and how many times. Then it's a simple double-click to load it up within the editor -- a proper integrated editor that allows you to edit pretty much everything, not a collection dated tools only allowing you to edit some things. More importantly, it shows the game world in 3D for world building and quest scripting. And if you make a change to a module (or dungeon) in most cases, you don't need to load up a save game where you haven't visited it yet, as the level data gets updated and you can also use various debug commands to reset variables.

There are limitations, but they are few and even then there are ways to get around much of it via scripting.

 

There are obviously those who do like those armors, many do not. Although I don't have any problem with them, I usually play the game as a female, and while I'd mostly use this mod, I'm editing the vanilla textures for my own mod at the moment.

 

As for adding model variations, unlikely, unless we had the same tools that Obsidian had when making the game. The few columns that were added to the appearance.2da obviously weren't there in K1, since the Model/Texure variation columns stop at I in that game(which is the Revan/Star Forge Robes). The only way to do this would be to replace the M models, which obviously causes the issue that there is no model comparable to Bandon's that will fit females. Though the M models and textures could only be replaced for the males, while the female models/textures stay the same.

I wasn't going to touch the female version, as though it can be improved, it still works. The male one doesn't and seems like it was based off of the female one.

I'm often quite puzzled as to why such things were hard-coded by Bioware for K1, and carried over into TSL. It seems that this is a completely unnecessary limitation to have for a game engine. At the very least, you would think you could go straight on up to Z in way of model / body variations. Yet for some reason they decided that you could only go up to I..? And my puzzlement doesn't stop there, as I find the whole 2da references a bit on the idiotic side. Why am I setting up NPC appearances via a 2da when I should be setting up these options via a utc file instead. Take Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you set up all the appearance stuff like model, textures, body / animation set to use, stats, equips etc, within the NPC's data file. I'm pretty sure that is how it was in Morrowind as well -- an old game of the same time of KOTOR.

I guess you could chalk it up to legacy code from NWN and the first amateurish attempts at coding an RPG game engine, but, I suspect that they still do things this way with ME3 as well.

Like the blood addition to Peragus

 

Finally realizes its potential as a horror survival level

So far it is just the Republic soldiers that have been changed along with the Maintenance officer. All the other bodies use a generic dead body placeable, in order to replace these I would need to do something similar to what Varsity Puppet did with his Peragus mod, except I would be using placeables as opposed to what I take it to be NPC characters set to being dead. Though there are some issues with the script, as I would be initiating it differently, the big problem is that unlike the Republic soldiers and Maintenance officer, where there are existing models to edit, there are none for the rest. So in order to make them look better than they currently do, I would need to make these essentially from other models -- miner uniform and NPC heads. Not sure how involving that will be to do, as I figure it would requiring getting acquainted with the "bones" (animation) skeleton in order to move the mesh about without having to do it all manually vertex by vertex.

It's something I'd like to do, but, I kinda wanted to have an update release by now...

A darker TSL...

So, I'm coming to a point where I'm not just content to change textures and want to start changing (and editing) models for stuff. One thing I want to do is modify the male model for the Zeison Sha armor. Though it all started with wanting to make the Exar Kun amrmor in game look more appropriate, it really has to do with the model itself. As much as I like the addition of armored robes to the game, I really dislike the male version of this model as it never quite looked right to me.

Screens below with my main gripes:

I'm kinda wondering what the reaction will be with people, as I'm sure many folks are fans of the look of the original armor, even if I am not. So, what do people think..?

Originally I had intended in creating a new model / body variant and then editing UTI item files to reference it, however, it seems that model variations will not go beyond N -- they range from A through N, and that is where they stop. I've tried setting this via the baseitems 2da file but in game the model shown is the Jedi Master Robe, which is model variation N.

If anyone knows whether you can create model variations beyond N, please let me know even if it is to point me to whatever resources online there are for them, as I can't seem to find anything definitive; though, I could be searching in the wrong place for the wrong thing .

Revised HK series textures...

In order to have specular for for things like NPC clothing, I've had to make edits to the Appearance.2da file. Otherwise, specular will make the texture appear transparent, no matter what the accompanying TXI file says. 

Since I had to make a lot of changes, at least to one particular field within the file, I decided to also make some additional changes in way of default appearance for your characters based on class and if you put on any "clothes" object...

As the textures and models were packaged with TSL, I decided to reinstate the Scoundrel, Scout and Soldier class look from KOTOR; especially as they kind of correspond to the Jedi classes of Consular, Sentinel and Guardian. Plus, I figure that if you were stripped of your force powers, then you would still end up doing things along the lines of your character, just without the force. So, you would end up looking like one of these classes rather than wearing dorky clothes.

Plus, I like the original models even if I have given the textures a quick update; I also plan on doing variant of each for a class specific unique clothing you'll be able to get in game at Peragus.

Some more loose ends as it were, in this case I wanted to do the party members that you initially acquire at Peragus -- FYI: T3's new textures were shown in previous screens; such as Ebon Hawk.

Yeah, most of the setup for animated textures I already know. Although I didn't know the height and width values weren't needed.

 

The funny bit, is that you can actually find the TXI information for textures that should have it(though I didn't discover this myself, although at the moment I forget who did). Clicking on the "Hex Viewer" option while a texture is selected, brings up the Byte Viewer. Then click the ANSI option, and at the bottom of the window, is the txi information the texture uses by default.

 

I did try and fix that dancer advert texture already, although unfortunately, I only have eleven frames, provided by another user here. Just copying the last only makes the animation seem to skip, and getting each frame in the exact place where the transition between the frames is seemless, isn't exactly easy. But at this point, I'm a bit more keen on replacing the thing, than trying to deal with that.

 

Although I have done animated textures before, that lightsaber blade mod I made was far easier. With this texture mod though, I did animate one of the pannel textures on Peragus, mostly just using simple fades in each frame. I also animated the Kolto tank, mostly to make the large pipe look like it was constantly pumping or filtering the kolto, although that I think I have to fix, which shouldn't be too difficult.

Yeah I figured you probably had some idea of TXI files, but, I think not everyone has a clear idea of these -- it appears that some people don't even know hot to make a basic one so as to get specular working instead of having something appear transparent if the TXI is missing   .

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that you can just have the one strip of 11 frames if you wanted to do it that way. Personally, I would want to do the animations myself as that allows me to do what ever I want to do.

Also, you don't really need 11 frames to have an effective animation, or at least all of them in order to have a smooth animation. You could go with some key frames and then in between these have something different -- I've gone with suggestive faces. One thing you could do, is simply have 2 or 3 frames of dancer silhouettes, and then to vary these, you have additional frames with these as a base but what is different is the text you might display. You can use different styles for these, different sets of words, or simply, the same word just written in a different Star Wars font -- to indicate your trying to say the same thing to multiple segments of the public.

You can also play around with the background, by animating or changing that by using simple patterns that rotate or change color. Any of these technigues, even if you only end up with 6 frames, would be better than the 9 (or whatever) frames the current texture has .

Then you just play around with the fps rate, though, "fps 1" will probably be the most effective.

I think they hand painted the letters rather than using a font -- there are at least 2 for aurebesh I know of along with a bunch of others for Star Wars. They probably didn't exist when the game was made. I have a feeling they were quickly made either as a temporary measure or last moment; as they are very low in quality compared to the original sign textures of KOTOR.

The textures though generally square are used on non-square surfaces; so they get stretched (or squished) making things look more pixelated than they should be.

The only tool I know of and use to extract textures as TGA is KOTOR Tool. Maybe it is the tool that is creating them this way, as it also has problems viewing normal (bump) maps even though it can export them out as TGA just fine. But my guess is that this is how they were created for the game by whatever tool Obsidian developed for creating their TPC image files. There may be some good reason for this, but, I really doubt it. It seems to me that they went out of their way to make modding these textures as difficult as possible, as the garbling seems to me to be completely unnecessary.

FYI: this can probably be tested by exporting the animated texture as a TPC, if it shows up normally in game, then I think that the game treats TGAs differently.

If the animated texture is based on another one, like a console. Then you better off simply using this as a base to create all the varied frames of your animation, then, you combine them into the one texture. In the case of the Twi'leks, there was no texture it was based on and it was so garbled that piecing together the original texture, or just one frame of it, would be pointless. Especially as I don't really like the texture to begin with -- it's kinda lame, like the dancing animation is kinda lame .

You're just better off creating the frames yourself, to suit your mod -- free vector / clipart can be a big help; and can be edited and exported as PNGs by Inkscape -- and then combining it into the one image. Each frame needs to have the same length of sides, and be square and cleanly divisible by 2 -- like 512X512 -- however, they actually don't need to be the same length so as to create a large square. Some texts will imply that they have to be, they are wrong .

So, you can have a texture that is 1536x512 in size that is made up of a row of 1 made up of 3 frames. Then you have to create your TXI file for it -- which you probably now is just a TXT file renamed to TXI. It should have the same filename as the texture and have something like this in it:

 

envmaptexture CM_Baremetal

proceduretype cycle

numx 3

numy 2

fps 0.5 

 

This simply says that the row length (x) is made up of 3 frames and that there are 2 rows (y). You don't need the "envmaptexture CM_Baremetal" line, but as the texture it's for uses specular, it does -- left it in to show that these two don't have to be mutually exclusive. There is also no need to set how large a frame is by setting an X and Y for it, as the game is smart enough to use the above to figure it out by itself -- which makes it easier if you decide that you want to shrink the size of the texture, as you don't have to keep on updating the TXI file.

The "fps" part is frames-per-second, and usually you want to put in a whole number, however, you can also put n a decimal if you want frames to stay for longer than what the game considers to be a second.